Creative Media Practise: Project Evaluation

For our experimental project, I took the role of co-sound recorder and film editor. I feel that the audio aspect of the experimental film worked rather well, displaying enough variation in sounds to create an interesting experience, showing the listener a clear sense of place. The main weakness in our project was the visual aspect, this seeming at points to be quite dull and without focus, therefore distracting the audience from the sense of place being created. All in all I think that we worked well as a group, the communication between us being good and our meetings often being successful in that we always managed to finish something, whether this be recording sound of visuals, or planning something that may have been of use to the project in the future. I also feel that we adapted well to the change in our group as a new member joined us half way through the project due to issues with her previous group; this is a skill that I feel is important within the film business as it is required that people adapt to changes, which I feel we succeeded at. We worked well as a group, contributing equally when it came to ideas and general discussion about the project, which I feel made it more successful than it could have been had we been lacking in communication skills. It was clear to us at all times what stage we were at with the video or audio, meaning that no one wasted their time waiting or working on something that would be edited in any case.

One of the main problems with the process of creating our work lay in the planning, of which we did very little. The first step we took when given the project was to start going through the city to gather different types of audio so as to gain a better understanding of the sounds that certain places can create. We believed that this would give us inspiration as to what sort of place we wanted to give the audience a sense of, though in the end we quite liked the idea of the market place that we visited and utilised much of the audio footage collected on the first day. I feel that despite the fact we did not plan for this to happen, the market place is an area with a great deal of variation in sounds that would therefore lead to an extremely interesting sound piece if handled well. We gathered a large amount of audio footage on this first day, approaching different stalls to record the produce, as well as talking to the owner of one of the stalls who allowed us to record the conversation as a sort of interview which we later used in the final film. Though we managed to get a lot of audio footage from this area, I feel that if we had explored further into the city we may have found inspiration that would lead us to a different idea, or would have perhaps given us an opportunity to find something that would be interesting to film in the future for the visual aspect of the project. Reflecting on this, I believe that I have learnt the importance of extending and developing ideas as we were quick to settle on our first fully formed idea rather than developing it further than the initial stage.

As well as requiring development, I feel that we needed to plan ahead more while we were creating our audio piece as this would mean that we would have had more of an idea of what to film. We had a very general idea that time lapses would be used throughout so as to create a sense of time passing by, this simulating a sort of journey such as the journey that is made in the audio, but there was no more planning than this before we began filming. When we did eventually begin to film, most of it was improvised on the day, the members of the group each thinking of different areas of the city that we were familiar with that would hold a busy enough image that we could film for an extended period of time. There had been intentions, however, to introduce more interesting visuals, an example of this being to draw an outline of certain scenes and using chroma key to overlay the image, making it seem as if we had traced the video. This did not entirely work out well, though, as I was unable to use the chroma key effect in Final Cut Pro and so this footage did not make it into the film. I feel as if this is something that I need to improve on as an editor, as I should have made sure that I had practised an effect before we set to work on creating the footage therefore wasting some of our time that could have been spent doing something else useful. As well as this, we had originally intended to use a more formalist approach to editing, cutting the footage so that a one second clip would be followed by a two second clip, followed by a three second clip, etc. This did not end up working out as well as we had initially hoped and so is not entirely evident throughout the film, though I feel that experimenting with this led to the group as a whole being able to understand formalist film much better than beforehand when we had only heard about it in theory.

I feel that my own personal contribution to the project could have been heavily improved. While I was present for the capturing of footage, both audio and visual, I feel as if the editing process would have been made far easier, and the outcome would have appeared more aesthetically pleasing, had I taken the opportunity to continue filming without the need to create a group meeting. This would have meant that I would have been able to create a far more interesting video with more variation in images; the final project included extended time lapses of only five different scenes, two of which took place within the University building. In the end, this greatly effected how enjoyable the film was as there was not nearly enough footage to sustain interest for three minutes, and for the most part this footage was not related in any way to the audio project. This may have been in part due to the fact that the audio was being changed frequently while the video was being edited, although it was mostly because of the fact that we did not have a clear message to our experimental piece until very late in the time given to us. Had we done more planning in the beginning, I believe that the editing process would have been far easier as there would have been a clearer meaning to work with. This is something that I have taken on board thoroughly this semester, as planning has been an issue in both of my modules, and I feel that I have learnt enough about its importance to greatly improve on this next year, thus making the project a success due to the learning experienced I have gained from it.

Another area I feel I have improved in is my knowledge of Final Cut Pro, which I originally found an extremely daunting programme due to my greater experience with other editing software. Though I do not believe that it is the easiest of programmes to use, I feel as if this project has given me a great opportunity to learn more about how the programme works, and has given me the chance to learn enough skills so as to be able to work well on other projects without requiring a period of time to get used to editing with Final Cut Pro. However, I also feel that I should have perhaps had some more practise in using the programme before beginning the project as while I have learnt a lot, it has been at the expense of time that could have been spent editing the final project rather than experimenting with the footage that we gathered before settling on a plan. This will be avoided next time I am required to edit, though, as I have gained the skills I think are needed from this period of experimentation. I believe that this project has also enhanced my interest in editing, and due to the experience I have gained I think that I will take further interest in video editing in future projects.

All in all, while the visuals had not been entirely up to scratch for the most part, I believe that this project did its job in creating a sense of place even if this was mostly due to the audio track used. In this manner, I would say that it has been a successful project and has been a great learning experience in many different ways, from technical skills to learning how to adapt to changes within the project, such as the addition of a new member and changing the video itself so as to improve based on feedback given by tutors and other students.